Quotes from Dallas Willard

Now just think of what the quality of life and character must be in a person who would routinely interrupt sacred rituals to pursue reconciliation with a fellow human being. What kind of thought life, what feeling tones and moods, what habits of body and mind, what kinds of deliberations and choices would you find in such a person? When you answer these questions, you will have a vision of the true "rightness beyond" that is at home in God's kingdom of power and love.

Works are simply a natural part of faith. James's statement is about the inherent nature of faith, about what makes it up. It concerns what believing something really amounts to. It is not an exhortation to prove that one has faith or to work to keep one's faith alive.

Recall, now, that the kingdom of God is the range of his effective will: that is, it is the domain where what he prefers is actually what happens.

The church of Jesus Christ is not necessarily present when there is a correct administration of the sacrament and faithful preaching of the Word of God. The church of God is present where people gather together in the power of the resurrected life of Jesus Christ.

The situations in which we find ourselves are never as important as our responses to them, which come from our "spiritual" side. A carefully cultivated heart will, assisted by the grace of God, foresee, forestall, or transform most of the painful situations before which others stand like helpless children saying "Why?

Practice in not speaking can at least give us enough control over what we say that our tongues do not "go off" automatically. This discipline provides us with a certain inner distance that gives us time to consider our words fully and the presence of mind to control what we say and when we say it.

But this is an age for spiritual heroes—a time for men and women to be heroic in faith and in spiritual character and power.

We forgive someone of a wrong they have done us when we decide that we will not make them suffer for it in any way.

To say that "the righteous (or just) shall live by faith" does not mean that they live by blind and irresponsible leaps in total absence, or even in defiance, of knowledge. It does not mean that the "just" live in a state of ignorance or stupidity. They do on occasion act in specific ways beyond what they know, but only within a framework of knowledge that makes such action reasonable.

The blessedness was not in their condition of being poor, mournful, or disrespected. They were blessed because they could enter the kingdom, and to be in the kingdom means to be blessed no matter what else happens. They can rest in that. Their future in God is secured, and their present condition redeemed. Forever. No matter what.

Invite Jesus into each new situation or interaction.

They then easily moved on to the faith-destroying, even blasphemous idea that everything that happens in this world is caused by God.